It was a world that many knew but very few understood a tribute to a bond that was very new in the scope of the course of history, but strong and passionate. A love that consumed lives to the very hilt, and created hordes of followers and rabid belief systems within itself.
The electricity in the air was as primal, and at times reverent, eyes dancing from icon to icon, bathing in the presence of the revered persons and machines. But anyone, from the highest echelons of each order, to the basest of the follower, they all were here, in the heat, to race. The wild colors, the thunderous noise, and the sting of burning alcohol in the nostrils, and the crackle of an ominous voice over a speaker, reading off numbers and names like a beckoning call.
The memories of years past danced in Caroline’s mind, bringing warm thoughts as she daydreamed about the times at the track in late August of every year. It was such a brief slice of time, but one where her family was always truly and especially happy. But there was a twinge of black to it; her father would not be there this year. He’d passed shortly after the last year, to cancer. His last years were tough on her and her family. He’d lost all his teeth, his hair, 110 pounds, and was constricted to a wheel chair. Now that he was gone, everything had changed, in too dizzying of an array for her to think about right now. The house was gone, and her psychotic mother had burned a lot of the old photographs and his clothes, all of her sisters had promptly moved away, and Caroline was not on speaking terms with mom, or one of her sisters. It was a mess, one that took several cups of tea to explain.
The only thing that was left out of a mountain of a man, was a shattered family, was his half finished dream in Caroline’s apartment garage. She sat in it now occasionally, and wept, it still smelled like her dad. It was still hard to think of the good times. She bought it from her mother, as a last ditch effort to save a piece of her childhood and her father from oblivion.
She blew her nose and tried to remember and understand the excitement of that one track day a year that had kept her father energized for years to save every spare penny the family didn’t need to spend it on this machine, how his face lit up like a kid at the drag strip that the whole family went to every year’s “DragTationals” or some silly name like that.
They were simple people, always. Nothing was wasted, but dad had always said that everyone should have at least one toy. This was his, Caroline thought, his one toy. Actually the one toy had made him need a lot more toys, tools in fact, but that was okay. Dad had never let anyone go hungry, or let his girls go without a good Christmas.
Sitting in this machine was a little like meeting his first wife though, for Caroline. It wasn’t something she knew herself very well, but something that her dad had once loved, which made the car and that strange lady, somehow sacred. Just like the DragTationals, and the ancient blue waxed paper cups full of slushies that melted in the hot august sun with a wash of light so bright it almost took the color out of everything and made it like a collection of sun bleached or sepia toned photographs in her mind.
She felt herself cried out at that point, so she got out and stepped away from the car. It was not very pretty like the other cars she remembered. It was flat gray, with dull, silver wheels. The tires were almost brown looking, and a thick coat of dust coated the windshield and the hood, with a box of papers and some fingerprints on the hood. Part of the grill was missing, and it only had one headlight. She wondered for a few minutes, what it would be like to make her dad’s dream a reality. To take the car, and make it go down the rack like the other cars, like he wanted.
Maybe, in time, Caroline reasoned. For now, she could imagine that daddy was down in her garage, working on his car. He’d be back in time for dinner, and if his girls were busy with schoolwork or watching television, he’d sneak back out there, and work quietly into that night.
Daddy’s girls were always busy, nowadays.